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For my final project for Theater 20: Introduction to
Performance project under the instruction of UCLA's Brendan Hartnett I
worked with 3 of the girls in the class: Sharmini Thiagarajan, Sami Zarett,
SangEun Park (Ann), along with Kasia Ratajczak who I know through
UCLA's James Bridges Theater and is majoring in English. We explored the topic
of female sexuality, using Romeo and Juliet as a premise to explore female and
male expectations of orgasm when engaged in a romantic situation, females
response to asserting herself sexually, the different world views of women in
relation to their sexuality and the dynamic of female friend groups and
roommates. Each of the characters has a very specific world-view and interacts
with each of the other characters in a specific way, which was fun to watch as
it arose naturally once the actresses had stepped into the psyches of their
characters and began reacting naturally, prompted by how they felt their characters would to the situations.
Personally I was motivated to do this project because it seemed a good opportunity to explore the social ramifications surrounding women’s sexual development, as well as
to try to sift through some of the reasoning behind those expectations. It was ultimately an attempt to get the audience to refocus on the freedom a woman has to decide for herself what she would like to do; by presenting as many perspectives as we could portray within 5 minutes. Without rejecting any one
point of view, we created characters who fulfilled 3 prevalent attitudes towards female sexuality and allowed for the neutral participant Jamie to consider as many options on how to act as possible and choosing the
one that best suited the her. Ultimately she choses to pursue reciprocal
orgasm by being sexually assertive, but she doesn’t discredit any of the other girls sexual positions.
During preproduction, once the script was completed and we were sifting through
developing the characters, it helped me to keep in mind what was taught to us in our theater class. We needed to figure out the goals of each of the characters in the scene
and what actions were taking place between them as they dealt with the material
being expressed in their dialogue. We needed to give them actions that
expressed their internal processes and to play with blocking to find which ways
we could accentuate the emotional build up during the story in a way that felt
natural, not only to the audience but to the actresses, so that they could build
their own internal worlds with external support.
Kasia’s character Mona is a highly sexual, uninhibited and
engaging character. She doesn’t keep within her comfort zone and she pushes the
other girls to step outside of theirs as well, at times to the point of
aggressiveness. She is a liberating influence and each of the other characters react
to her personality in their own way. She is the story's antagonist in a way, in
Mona’s attempts to try to empower the other girls to assert their passions and
desires, she pushes against them. We gave her the activity of sitting on the
table and leaning over it when imparting her sexual wisdom to Jamie. The table became an
icon for a second body, which Mona is sexually engaging with and illustrating example
through.
Sami’s character Britney is Mona’s counter balance and
reacts defensively to her, due to her feelings of being morally threatened by Mona's sacrilegious attitude towards the sanctity of sex. She
holds tight to the idea of eternal and monogomous love. With Sami’s performance the wounds
that have been inflicted upon her character by others, due to her idealistic
nature, really came through. We gave her actions to express her character; she
drinks laxative tea and plays with her gold bracelet instead of making eye
contact and engaging with the other girls while speaking to them. She is hiding
behind her mask of perfection, her adherence to social norms of what the good
life is, is alluded to standing between her finding out what would actually make her feel
happy and free.
Sharmini’s character Jamie is the Juliet of our story,
bringing all these female perspectives out of the wood-works. In our tale she
is a loving character who accepts the various impassioned opinions of the other
characters with open consideration and acceptance. She does not react to any
opinion in agreeance or rejection, but rather applies their notions to her own
situation, finding what suits and feels true to her and what doesn’t. For her
character it was important that she remained neutral and open, she is the
character in which the audience experiences the situation. She was given the
activity of maintaining connectiveness to whatever woman was speaking through
eye contact and attention. She does not change her facial expressions or voice at any time to convey any sort of judgement towards any of the perspectives being expressed, she is non judgmental and in the end she gets what she wants.
Ann is the sage of our story, the character that brings a
level of rationality and wisdom to the conflict. She is alone on the couch and
her activity is studying, to establish her interest in knowledge and
understanding. Her character is one with the dynamic of women, but also she is
outside of it. She offers her input into the conversation like a word bubble of
a fortune cookie and then steps out again. Only twice is her input responded
to, once to say that she is right from Britney and once to say “well I’m no
Juliet” from Jamie. Even then it is like the dialogue being spoken by Ann could
have just as well been in the women’s head, since even when they respond to it
they are not engaging with her.
We had three meetings where the script was developed, during
this time the actresses read over their lines and the author Kasia took into
consideration their execution and feedback so that we could better trim the
excess verbiage and colloquialize the dialogue, tailoring it to the unique
personalities of the characters. This was very helpful when it came to us
shooting it, because it kept each character from falling into a mirror of the
others, which is something that was happening during the first draft of the
script when the girls were rehearsing together. Their energy would transfer and
soon it was difficult to decipher one character’s motivations and attitude from
the other. Line readings also helped girls maintain character mergence because they had to work alone and did not have the influence of any of the actresses.
We ran through the entire piece several times in wide shots
to cover where they were moving in the space and to get them comfortable with
their performances. It was difficult because they were not all off book, which
was my fault for not stressing it as important, but as long as we had a rough
estimate of when things where happening and where we were able to go into the
closer coverage. I have not begun the editing process yet, so I am not sure how
much I will be able to get away with in this type of shooting style, but it
will be a learning experience. Thank goodness for Chelsi Johnston
stepping in as AC and her notes to keep me on track. For
Jamie and Kasia’s parts, because it was so dependent upon each of them reacting
to the other, we did cross coverage and had the girls go through their entire
interaction.
For Ann and Sami whose characters are more isolated less
interactive personalities, we gave them line readings. Ann was especially a
challenge because of our language barrier, she is a student from Korea studying at UCLA for the summer. But ultimately her accent and composure when using the English language, allowed for her
character to maintain an air of aloofness and foreignness for American
audiences. Of course in the American culture, her asian influence lended itself to an association of eastern wisdom and
orientalism. Sami developed on her own a very deep and soulful take on her
character and maintained it in a genuine performance, which is very difficult
to get out of non-actors when they attempt a dramatic piece. Of course Sami is
not a non-actor and her level of professionalism stood out to all of the
members of our film crew.
The process of this project was much more focused on
performance than I have had experience with in my other projects. Unfortunately
I had to spend a good amount of time managing the cameras, because we had very
little time to do preproduction, but thanks to the two camera men Marcus
Chan and AndrewRosenstein's ability
to go with the flow and get the best they could get, we got away with it. Also
thanks to Priscila Alegria Nunez and a visit from our instructor who graciously took
over as sound mixer, we have quality audio for the project. Because the other actresses and I went through the
Theater 20 course together, we had developed a understanding and language that
allowed us to go further and develop better our work together. The experience
not only provided me with new useful tools to work with actors, but also a
deeper understanding of the demands and stress an actor must learn to overcome
to excel at their craft.
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